First Mother

And a Blessed Mother’s Day

May 13, 2024

The Matriarchs - Three generations. Daughters, granddaughters, Mom, sister and her daughter, and me.

The place of brokenness occasions its own healing. —Belden C. Lane

May your Mother’s Day be blessed because it is not a “Happy” day for some. The mother-wound runs deep and is generational. I have dedicated my life to healing it.

I was blessed to have many mothers: my first mother, the mother who raised me, mothers who loved me not by blood but by choice, and grandmothers who believed in me. We can never have too many mothers.

We are all born of a mother, and I have often wondered who the first mother is. In human genetics, what is known as Mitochondrial Eve is far from explaining how we got here and doesn’t account for the Y-chromosomal Adam, who naturally would have been conceived by and birthed through a woman. The mtDNA (maternal line) mapping of humans is very incomplete. Our minds may not grasp it, but our bodies know. When a woman gives birth, and her cervix opens to ten centimeters, it is the most open she will ever be, not just physically but also psychically. In that openness, she is connected to the mother who gave birth to her and the mother who gave birth to her mother in an unbroken lineage all the way back to the beginning of her ancestral line, to the beginning of time. It is a knowing that gives a woman strength to endure her labor. I trusted those women who had come before me. Giving birth to my two children is the most creative and empowering act I have experienced in this lifetime. But what happens when a mechanistic medical model takes over this experience through surgical intervention, causing generations of women to depend on it to give birth and to rescue them from the travails of childbirth?

We live in a world that seeks to break our psychic and ancestral connection and to sever our connection to what is yet to come. Many live in perpetual distraction and disconnection. We are made to doubt our inner knowing rather than to trust it. Even language and the images we hold as sacred that give meaning to our world are being held hostage.

And so I wonder about this first mother, knowing there will also be a last. We may try to trace our roots back through Mitochondrial Eve, but still, the character of Eve in the Christian bible was heavily influenced by the myth of Pandora, the first human woman created by a god. Eve and Pandora were tempted by their curiosity and ultimately gave in to temptation. Eve eats the forbidden fruit to gain the knowledge of evil. Pandora’s curiosity releases all manner of evil into the world. What remains is hope. Hope is what lay at the bottom of Pandora’s box after all manner of evil was released into the world.

I never lost hope in the search for my origins. Two years ago, through Ancestry.com, I found two precious half-sisters and confirmed who I thought might be my first mother. Sometimes, you first have to lose things if you ever have any hope of finding them. And even though my first mother had passed some years earlier, I am discovering who she was through the sisters that she raised. She was a woman who gave me up to love.

And so it is that I wish you a blessed Mother’s Day, knowing that truth persists and that one’s deepest wound is the source of one’s greatest gift. And ultimately – we are all given up to love.

It is not just your mother who may walk with you in spirit, it is her mother too. And her mother’s mother. And her mother’s friends, who loved by choice and not blood. And the women before them. Generations and generations of female energy, watching in admiration as you forge ahead living better, feeling better, accepting better, than they ever did. As they were much hoped you would. —Donna Ashworth, Wild Hope